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From the I've-heard-enough-and-won't-take-it-anymore department, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39024648
The BBC reports that former Congressman Rush Holt, now part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is the spokesman for a movement "standing up for science".
His remarks reflect growing concern among researchers that science is disregarded by President Trump.
Scientists across the US plan to march in DC on 22 April.
[...] "To see young scientists, older scientists, the general public speaking up for the idea of science. We are going to work with our members and affiliated organisations to see that this march for science is a success."
Mr Holt made his comments at the AAAS annual meting in Boston as President Trump appointed a fierce critic of the Environmental Protection Agency as its head. Scott Pruitt has spent years fighting the role and reach of the EPA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:19PM
Our culture has a science archetype. "The professor" from gilligans isle lets say. Or some steampunk stereotype. That hero archetype knows more than most, can predict the future (using scientific models mostly) always tells the trust, and is a little crazy poor monk-ish and in exchange we cut him some slack and trust him utterly on all technical questions and let him think further than most and let him explore some weird ideas and technologies.
Sorry, but is the audience of Gilligan's Island reading this prof's blog on quantum computing? Or is this blog -- as I suspect -- mostly read by specialists who know better and clearly can see the difference between, "Oh, Jim posted on CS again -- interesting..." and "Oh, Jim's off on one of his barroom rants again." (I'm using "Jim" as a stand-in here because you still haven't revealed the blog you're talking about.) If the general public is at risk of encountering your mystical scientist figure pontificating on high, I guess MAYBE I could understand your point.
thats how you get crappy TV commercials about fake doctors saying tobacco smoke is healthy.
Yeah, see that's a completely different standard. In another recent post you said:
Lets try an experiment and put the good doctor in a labcoat (I don't think theoretical physicists wear lab coats, but whatever) and give him a stethoscope and have him make a commercial for tobacco companies explaining how smoking is really healthy for people and he's a doctor so he should know.
That's a good standard. Does your CS guy literally say stuff like, "You should believe in my views on immigration because I'm a scientist, so I should know"?? I explicitly asked this in a previous post. IF he's doing that, I'll happily join you in condemning him, because he is clearly misusing the word "science" and abusing his status a "scientist." Short of that, I'm not sure why anybody should give his views on immigration any more credence than they should on what wines are good or what movies he likes... and certainly not anybody in the audience of a personal blog that mostly posts on very technical stuff.
But let's step out of the mythos (and the shrouded figure/blog you apparently don't want to reveal to the rest of us) and talk about a real person, perhaps?
Neil deGrasse Tyson has made a lot of political commentary in the past year, including some Trump jokes. And then there's his radio show, with celebs, etc. There's a lot of crap said there about all sorts of topics, and Tyson frankly acts like a buffoon on many occasions. I don't endow any of the crap he says with a lot of significance "because he's a scientist," nor do I see him as some great "mouthpiece" for Science itself. He's just a dude, sometimes entertaining to listen to, sometimes (in my opinion) annoying. He happens to have credentials and knowledge about science, so when he speaks on an area of expertise (like astronomy), I might pay attention. On just about any other topic (even science areas outside of his field), I don't really care what he says. Why should we?
But at least with Tyson, you could at least make an argument that he SHOULD be a little careful what he says, because he's somewhat known as a "public figure" representing science in general. Maybe he's a little like your mythical Campbellian "Scientist" archetype. But unless your mystical CS prof is giving interviews on talk shows on science, I don't think anyone could reasonably conclude that he is representing "science" in any meaningful way to the general public. At best, he's apparently posting a bunch of technical stuff on his blog that only specialists are likely to read. And specialists (unlike the general public) are probably even better equipped to recognize that when a dude speaks out of his field, nobody has to listen to him.
Maybe the lesson of the post-internet world is we all LARP and you can't archetype 24x7x365x"a lifetime". But you still gotta follow the rules reasonably well and just like a knight in shining armor playing with a cell phone is inappropriate, someone LARPing as an archetypal Prof is going to get pushback if he switches gears and slides right into conniving merchant mode or BS artist politician mode while still wearing his Gilligans Isle Professor Costume.
I said before and I'll say it again -- if the blog is really like 95% hard science and 5% rants, I think segregating posts might be a good thing just to target different audiences more clearly. But if another mythical scientist has a personal blog with 25% hard science he found this week, 25% politics, 25% wine reviews, and 25% cat videos, it's just the dude's personal blog. Why should I care about his opinions on politics anymore than I care about his opinions on wine or the cutest cats?
Frankly, I think the Scientist archetype is complete BS and the faster we can get rid of it, the faster we can actually educate the public on what science really is. And I'm actually more concerned here about the suggestion here that people's free speech as private people should be curtailed because someone from the audience of Gilligan's Island might accidentally stumble on a hard science blog where they can't understand most of the posts, but for some bizarre reason will then conclude, "OH -- this guy has views on immigration! Honey, come quick -- look: a SCIENTIST has views on immigration! No, I don't understand a damn word of the rest of this stuff. But this post -- We should pay close attention; go get my notepad, so I can write down what I'm supposed to think from a SCIENTIST!"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:45PM
Well, maybe we're just not destined to agree. But one last point is you're seeming to disagree with me about
nor do I see him as some great "mouthpiece" for Science itself. He's just a dude, sometimes entertaining to listen to
When the whole point of this article is some rabble rouser is trying to speak for all of science as one against Trump. Not some random bunch of people who happen to merely coincidentally be STEM grads or merely coincidentally happen to be employees of some university, but "all of science"
I'm kinda over using that prof's physics blog as an individual concrete example, when we're not agreeing on overall larger scale topics like what the mythos are in our culture.
I mean fundamentally we're never going to agree because I see "the scientist as archetype" right outta Campbell as being a great thing, a technological enabler, a step forward for division of labor. Isn't it cool to have a soothsayer who's always accurate and true? Yeah I'm sure on a personal level its quite annoying sometimes. That's the thing about myths the "winner" is often pretty screwed and almost like a well balanced RPG like DnD or pathfinder, every archetype has something that sucks.
And if you do downsize the archetype of the scientist, well, OK, and your plan going forward once its flushed for equal or better societal outcome is .... and you better not say the general public will just have to think harder and have better taste, because that ain't happening. Maybe you have an idea where things will be better without that archetype. I don't think so, but if you win, I sure hope you do!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:40PM
Isn't it cool to have a soothsayer who's always accurate and true?
No. Because it places Scientists as Priests in a new religion. The scientific method is meant as a way to move beyond authoritarian belief systems, not reinforce them. And it is fundamentally antithetical to science to view ANYTHING as "always accurate and true." The danger of false beliefs in inerrancy are already making their marks in many fields -- people returning to voodoo "folk" medicine because medical science is revised over time and therefore "doctors aren't to be trusted," anti-vax folks, etc. Science CHANGES as new research is done -- it's foundational to the nature of the endeavor, and anyone who teaches that a Scientist is "always accurate and true" is not only anti-science, but will likely lead to more public distrust of science when scientists change their views as new research arrives.
And if you do downsize the archetype of the scientist, well, OK, and your plan going forward once its flushed for equal or better societal outcome is .... and you better not say the general public will just have to think harder and have better taste, because that ain't happening.
I'm not saying we should "flush" the idea of science as a valuable endeavor which is likely the best method humanity has so far uncovered to make progress. I'm saying creating a mythos around scientific figures and raising them up as the new "prophets" or even gods is a really bad idea. Science is done by flawed, real human beings. And they aren't always right -- for all sorts of reasons. And they are biased sometimes and they do let things influence them.
I agree with you that the general public is probably never going to quite get the details of science, but we can do better about giving them the sense of a more realistic portrayal of how science works and who scientists are -- so that they can not lose "faith" in science when they see conflicting preliminary studies come out. Or so they understand the difference between two preliminary studies that disagree in their findings vs. when there's 99% scientific consensus on a topic after rigorous evidence has been collected. We CAN do at least somewhat better about educating people on science. Part of my personal research is on the history of science, and I've learned a LOT about the realities of science by looking at historical controversies.
But we don't generally do that in science classes. We don't talk about how scientists are frequently wrong -- because they have incomplete data, or they aren't quite seeing the whole picture. If we did so, more people might become interested in science and realize they too can discover stuff about the world (even mundane stuff, not completely new discoveries for humanity). They might get a sense of how ideas evolve, how we can collectively work together to understand the world, rather than just being dictated facts from a science teacher/priest.
If we did so, we could literally show them why, for example, Aristotelean physics made so much sense to so many educated people for about 2000 years, and then why it was so hard when folks like Galileo came along for even educated scientists to be convinced by him. Instead, we create a completely false narrative (which itself is a construction of 19th-century historians) which places Galileo in the status of a demi-god, rising up like Perseus to combat the Pope and his minions and the ignorant Churchfolk, to rescue his new beloved "Science" from those monsters. And even though he loses the battle, he mutters "And yet it moves..." under his breath. The demi-god becomes martyr, offered as a sacrifice for our sins in not believing in the true Science. Utter BS for ALL sorts of reasons, but schoolkids learn it every year. On his Cosmos program, Neil deGrasse Tyson himself propagated a lot of myths from the history of science made up in the 19th century.
I'm not saying we can turn the general public into scientists. But keeping people ignorant and treating scientists as a substitute priesthood is just a bad idea and will backfire. Arguably, I think it already has. Americans are now probably more likely than they've been in the past few generations to view science as merely some sort of set of "competing views" like politics, rather than as an empiricism-driven enterprise that's always incomplete, always has some flaws, and sometimes takes detours before zeroing in on better and more accurate data. If the public has no clue of this process, but rather views Scientists as Priests dictating eternal truths, all of the conflicting studies they hear about now don't seem like a gradual quest toward a more complete picture, but instead merely a bunch of different opinions. Then, when a better, much more complete meta-study arrives and basically settles the question, the public still says, "Well.. maybe... but they were wrong before, so what makes 'em right this time?!"
If anything, THAT is a much better reason for more segregation of scientific views from other opinions from public figures or scientists, rather than just to maintain the mythical Scientist archetype. You may take that as an olive branch of agreement, I suppose, if you like. But I still would argue that we should insist on a better understanding for the general public of the separation of scientist speaking on science rather than other personal opinion... because that's pretty much essential to what I've just said in this post. In order to understand why Science is valuable, one needs to be able to understand how, for example, different assumptions about expertise should apply when a scientist speaks on his field vs. when he talks about politics. Political opinion is not subject to the rules of science, and rigorous scientific findings are not simply a "matter of opinion"; that's something we all need to teach people, not "sweep under the rug" by pretending that scientists can't actually have personal ideas or opinions.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:38AM
We agree that elevating Science to a perverted Priesthood is bad. The only difference is you refuse to see that is our current reality. You just described Moldbug's Cathedral far too accurately to have never thought about it, even if you have never encountered a word of his writing. Look again and see this time. Then read a few old books (it is the generally accepted initiation ritual) and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.
One word of warning, the world you will see with the Red Pill is a lot crappier than the illusion of the Blue one and you won't get to fly around and fight bad guys like Neo either because this ain't a movie.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:06PM
We agree that elevating Science to a perverted Priesthood is bad.
And my rather optimistic point is if we can keep the priesthood of Ohms Law focused on Ohms Law and via the mannerbund or whatever strongly discourage them from anthropological meddling outside their areas of expertise, that's sorta kinda OK.
I see jmorris and I have read the same things with microscopically different conclusions and reasonings, turning any disagreement with jmorris into something like if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it... so regardless if the Cathedral is defanged or chemically tranquilized or a well trained puppy that doesn't show its teeth, or is replaced with a housecat, the end result of less dog bites is about the same although we could debate the exact solution method endlessly.